Starling should turn to the cabinets, but she was fixed on the cell. Here she had had the most remarkable encounter of her life. Here she had been startled, shocked, surprised.
Here she had heard things about herself so terribly true her heart resounded like a great deep bell.
She wanted to go inside. She wanted to go in, wanting it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train.
Starling shined her light around her, looked on the back side of the row of filing cabinets, swept her light through the nearby cells.
Curiosity carried her across the threshold. She stood in the middle of the cell where Dr. Hannibal Lecter had spent eight years. She occupied his space, where she had seen him standing, and expected to tingle, but she did not. Put her pistol and her flashlight on his table, careful that the flashlight didn’t roll, and put her hands flat on his table, and beneath her hands felt only crumbs.
Overall, the effect was disappointing. The cell was as empty of its former occupant as a snake’s shed skin. Starling thought then that she came to understand something: Death and danger do not have to come with trappings. They can come to you in the sweet breath of your beloved. Or on a sunny afternoon in a fish market with “Macarena” playing on a boom box.
To business. There were about eight feet of filing cabinets, four cabinets in all, chin-high. Each had five drawers, secured by a single four-pin lock beside the top drawer. None of them was locked. All were full of files, some of them fat, all of them in folders. Old marbleized paper folders gone limp with time, and newer ones in manila folders. The files on the health of dead men, dating back to the hospital’s opening in 1932. They were roughly alphabetical, with some material piled flat behind the folders in the long drawers. Starling skipped quickly along, holding her heavy flashlight on her shoulder, walking the fingers of her free hand through the files, wishing she had brought a small light she could hold in her teeth. As soon as she had some sense of the files she could skip whole drawers, through the J’s, very few K’s, on to the L’s and bam: Lecter, Hannibal.
Starling pulled out the long manila folder, felt it at once for the stiffness of an X ray negative, laid the folder on top of the other files and opened it to find the health history of the late I. J. Miggs. Goddammit. Miggs was going to plague her from the grave. She put the file on top of the cabinet and raced ahead into the M’s. Miggs’s own manila folder was there, in alphabetical order. It was empty. Filing error? Did someone accidentally put Miggs’s records in Hannibal Lecter’s jacket? She went through all the M’s looking for a file without a jacket. She went back to the J’s. Aware of an increasing annoyance. The smell of the place was bothering her more. The caretaker was right, it was hard to breathe in this place. She was halfway through the J’s when she realized the stench was … increasing rapidly.
A small splash behind her and she spun, flashlight cocked for a blow, hand fast beneath her blazer to the gun butt. A tall man in filthy rags stood in the beam of her light, one of his outsize swollen feet in the water. One of his hands was spread from his side. The other hand held a piece of a broken plate. One of his legs and both of his feet were bound with strips of sheet.
“Hello,” he said, his tongue thick with thrush. From five feet Starling could smell his breath. Beneath her jacket, her hand moved from the pistol to the Mace.
“Hello,” Starling said. “Would you please stand over there against the bars?”
The man did not move. “Are you Jesa?” he asked.
“No,” Starling said. “I’m not Jesus.” The voice. Starling remembered the voice.
“Are you Jesa!” His face was working.
That voice. Come on, think. “Hello, Sammie,” she said. “How are you? I was just thinking about you.”
What about Sammie? The information, served up fast, was not exactly in order. Put his mother’s head in the collection plate while the congregation was singing “Give of Your Best to the Master.” Said it was the nicest thing he had. Highway Baptist Church somewhere. Angry, Dr. Lecter said, because Jesus is so late.
“Are you Jesa?” he said, plaintive this time. He reached in his pocket and came out with a cigarette butt, a good one more than two inches long. He put it on his shard of plate and held it out in offering.
“Sammie, I’m sorry, I’m not. I’m—”
Sammie suddenly livid, furious that she is not Jesus, his voice booming in the wet corridor:
I WAN TO GO WIV JESA
I WAN TO GO WIV CRIEZ!
He raised the plate shard, its sharp edge like a hoe, and took a step toward Starling, both his feet in the water now and his face contorted, his free hand clutching the air between them.
She felt the cabinets hard at her back.
“YOU CAN GO WITH JESUS … IF YOU ACT REAL NICE,” Starling recited, clear and loud as though she called to him in a far place.
“Uh huh,” Sammie said calmly and stopped.
Starling fished in her purse, found her candy bar. “Sammie, I have a Snickers. Do you like Snickers?”
He said nothing.
She put the Snickers on a manila folder and held it out to him as he had held out the plate.
He took the first bite before he removed the wrapper, spit out the paper and bit again, eating half the candy bar.
“Sammie, has anybody else been down here?”